Using phpmyadmin, in table cms_security_agents:
- find the Baidu bot entry
- change the agent_ban field to -1

Yandex is also another useless Russian bot that consumes resources.
In the same table, find the YANDEX bot:
- change the agent_ban field to -1

Now wait for their session to finish or remove their entries from your session table.

What should the Baidu entry look like? I deleted it and put in a new one with the agent full name as baidu* - do wildcards work? It seems from IPtracker that nothing identifying itself as Baidu is getting through but there are still masses of hits from baiduspiders...

I also banned the range 220.181.108.1 - 220.181.108.255 but IPTracker still shows lots of hits from that range.

Am I barking down the wrong tree with these bots? Should I be looking elsewhere, like at the calendar module for example as nanocairdo suggests?

Site should be there at the moment - no idea what the hosts are playing at!

I've set the scrolling calendar block to registered users only - it has reduced the number of db queries on the front page from 107 to 63 so a fair amount. Would this be sufficient for the problems I've had?

Incidentally with that IP range I've banned it is still showing up in IPTracker...

Your host is correctly protecting the other server users from resource hogs, which is what your site appears to be to them. You're lucky - in times gone by Site5 would simply have put your site down until you could prove to them that it could be safely returned online and that might have been days/weeks.

I'm not getting involved in your ip banning - I just don't have the time.

If you ban through security, just bear in mind that it won't be immediate (refer my earlier post).

Nano, Rightly or wrongly Pro_News is designed to have 1 entry in cms_pronews_sections with key value of 0. I (now) know that key value of 0 with auto_index is deprecated, but it is never used as such. Table is initially loaded with records at 0 and 1, so the 0 key never gets to be auto-incremented.

I can't see how an error of a deprecated key value can cause excessive CPU cycles.

We are only trying to guess, and if sql was the cause to also fix, the issue.
A table come out with a warning and I decided to take actions.

@rosbif If the table was designed like this it can stay that way.

@layingback Remember that the module is subject to be broken, I did make sure to be understood when I asked to check and then repair only broken tables, one table per run, because i know the risks involved.
This table, also, cannot be repaired. Hope it doesn't get damaged or repairing the table may delete the 0 index ... re-add the index later? If mysql lets you to.

@robif Let us know how it goes. What puzzle me is the usual "nothing changed but from 2 days my site is overloading the server"

Is you site sending out mails? Do you have any module with "tell a friend feature", have you or anyone else modified anything?

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